Steele’s book takes in part of that period when Martens was still trying to compensate for the economic slump that overtook the colonies in the forties. Lithography and, on at least one occasion, etching were taken up as additional sources of income, while in his search for clients among the landowners the artist had been pushed further and further afield.

Aside from a few brief and passing references to his artistic habits, Steele directs most of his comments to the history of each homestead or run that Martens sketched and painted. I kept wishing he would tell us more – particularly about those events contemporary with the sketches. As the works themselves do nothing to alter our present understanding of Martens or his work, it’s my feeling that the latter should have been used as the skeleton or springboard for a social history. And the first question such a book would ask would surely be: why did Martens choose to visit the northern settlement, rather than the western district of Victoria? One doubts if the northern landscape is inherently more amenable to the artist’s pictorial demands, or that he was more likely to find clients there. Something else must have decided him.

I imagine that many people would think Ted Andrew suffers from too much imagination: In his self-published ‘vanity’ book this ex-shearer’s cook and amateur painter has written a tract for the times and illustrated it with six colour reproductions of his paintings. Even with their vaguely primitivist touch the paintings are awful, but the text hammers away at our indifference to the threat of a nuclear catastrophe, our love of filthy lucre, at the same time as it declares the author’s faith in a benevolent deity.

Though I found myself agreeing with much of what he had to say, I kept wishing he had written an autobiography instead, for he belongs to that now forgotten breed of opinionated and self-educated social radicals Australia once produced in abundance. You know, someone like Percy Cerutty, not your callow sociology student, your unscrupulous ‘educational worker’.